Posts Tagged ‘GPP’

When you’re using a Service Based Computing environment (for example Microsoft Remote Desktop Services) based on Windows Server 2012 R2 or Server 2016, all the users have access to the ‘right-click’ menu on the Windows button.

It’s very easy to delete some options from the ‘right-click’ menu, for example by using Group Policy Preferences.

There’re three folders inside this folder, Group1, Group2 and Group3. All of these folders have there own shortcuts. In this example I only want users to have access to ‘Bureaublad’ or ‘Desktop’. So I only need to remove ‘Group2’ and ‘Group3’.

1.) First of all start the Group Policy Management Console
2.) Create a new GPO
3.) Navigate to Computer Configuration / Preferences / Windows Settings / Folders
4.) Add two new items. Action: DeleteC:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WinX\Group2C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\WinX\Group3
5.) Enable all five options
6.) Close the Group Policy Management Editor and link the GPO to the Organization Unit within the Active Directory.
7.) Send a ‘gpupdate /force’ command to the RDS servers and reboot the servers
8.) After the reboot, the ‘right-click’ menu is almost empty

When you’re are using a lot of virtual machines or environments, it’s somethimes realy usefull to see in what environment or on what server you’re logged in. If created a really nice solution for my servers, basically Remote Desktop Services in different environments, that does exact my I need! I’ve changed the displayname in Windows Explorer to the value “user on server”, for example: “mark on prod-rds-01”.

You can set this new value with Group Policy Preferences or some other scripting.

1.) Create a new GPO in the Group Policy Management Console
2.) Navigate to “User Configuration / Preferences / Windows Settings / Registry
3.) Create a new registry item and browse to the following registry key:
HKCU/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/Explorer/CLSID/{20D04FE0-3AEA-1069-A2D8-08002B30309D}
4.) Change the default REG_SZ value to “%username% on %computername%”
5.) Login to the specific server where you targeted the GPO and open Windows Explorer
6.) The name of your computer has changed to “username on computername”